Neuropathology Quotes

The story of Bennet Omalu is a riveting story; it's just a riveting tale. I knew from the beginning if I stayed close to that kind of storytelling and focussed on the character, then the other stuff comes along with it, and the message becomes baked into the journey.

I started out as a neurologist. I then trained in neuropathology and was focused on neurodegeneration. So, for years, I studied Alzheimer's, aging, Parkinson's, that kind of thing.

What I did when I identified Mike Webster's thing, I showed it to other doctors. We all agreed that this was something new, but we had to give it a name. This was not dementia pugilistica. Maybe we could have called it dementia footballitica!

Omalu first found the tau 'threads' in the brain of former Steeler Mike Webster in 2002 and published his findings in 2005, in the journal 'Neurosurgery.'

Certainly, our work has identified CTE in many professional football players, but we're also seeing it in a very high percentage of college players.

I can be a bit of a science geek. I tend more towards reading about brain science, neuroscience.

The individual can maintain himself in a society definitely organized only through possessing an equally definite mental and moral constitution. This is what the neuropath lacks. His state of disturbance causes him to be constantly taken by surprise by circumstances.

The relationship between concussions and the asserted clinical symptoms of C.T.E. remains unknown.

It may act as an ancillary factor, but by itself, the mutation in tau doesn't give you Alzheimer's disease. This is not to say the tau is not very important. It may be important in propagating the disorder from one cell to another. But as a causal mechanism, the evidence is strongest for beta amyloid abnormalities.

I decided, as a medical student, to devote myself to a study of the brain.

Dave Duerson had classic pathology of CTE and no evidence of any other disease.

I don't know if this is the flat-out strangest, but I'll never forget handling a human brain. It had been sliced into sections for autopsy, each about an inch thick, and felt like pork tenderloin. I swear to god, my first thought was that if you were to dust it with chipotle and cinnamon and saute it in butter, it would probably be delicious.

It turns out that this part of the brain is one of the first areas that's attacked by Alzheimer's disease. So we can now use some of the basic understanding of this part of the brain to ask the simple question, 'What is going wrong with these special cells in the hippocampus at the very earliest stages?'

Most Alzheimer's sufferers aren't diagnosed until their 70s. However, we now know that their brains began deteriorating long before that.

I'm trying to do some things with my brain institute to understand more about the impact of concussion on brain tissue, because we have some scientists over there who are really good at looking at brain tissue and the effects of things on brain tissue.

To diagnose and treat a brain disorder accurately, it would be necessary to look at the brain directly. Looking at behavior alone can miss a vital piece of the puzzle and provide an incomplete, or even a misleading, picture of the child's problems.

I want Alzheimer's. I want Lou Gehrig's disease. I want Parkinson's. I want Huntington's. I want to be the face and voice of all these neurological traumas. I want them all.

More and more NFL players have been willing their bodies to science so that their brains can be studied even if they die of other causes.

It's the subconcussive hits, the constant bam, bam, bam that linemen like Suh give and receive. Those are the hits scientists say cause the lasting damage to the brain, the kind of injuries that made guys like Mike Webster, Terry Long, and so many others go crazy. The subconcussive hits - every single play.

I have a lot of college football players in my Brain Bank with CTE.